And what about the way Harold made sense of his life as he lived it, the everyday vocabulary of morals, moods, character, aspirations, temptations, values, ideals?
They set the general mood – the moral climate in which firms operate; they lay down rules and regulations; they levy taxes; and they can choose how to deploy billions of pounds of taxpayers' money through outsourcing, public-private partnerships, and, in the case of the bailed-out banks, direct public ownership.
It follows that the judge and his or her character, moral sense, background, mood swings and attention span (one judge was recently reported to have fallen asleep while hearing evidence) have great consequence for the destinies of those who come before them.
You and your Church may continue losing influence by allowing politics, politicians and judges to set the moral and spiritual mood in your entertainment, work, school and society.
The most difficult scenes occur early and set the grim mood and moral stakes.
The Economist captured this mood of moral confusion when it observed that Britain was 'examining the dark corners of its soul'.
He argues that a mood of "moral relativism" was galvanized by the legalization of abortion, growing divorce rates and an "agnosticism at the heart of the French republic".
But it captures the mood of moral indignation, anger and grief leavened by darkly visionary hilarity that has driven this Angeleno artist over the course of his idiosyncratic six-decade career.
And there was everything I'd liked in the work of Higgins or Leonard or Pelecanos: the inventive dialogue, the characters etched in shades of grey, the prevailing mood of moral ambiguity and profound cynicism as to the motives and efficacy of the forces of law and order.
The payoff was supposed to be a unification of logic for sentences in various moods, including moral sentences which Hare thought were a species of universal imperative.
